My column from Lebanon newspaper 10/19/16:
On April 10, 2015, a cocktail party for “leading news figures and top-level Clinton staff” was held at the Upper East Side home of Joel Benenson in New York City. Benenson is the chief strategist for the Hillary Clinton campaign.
It was also described as a “fully off the record” gathering designed to set out Clinton’s campaign message shortly before her official announcement on April 12 to run for the presidency.
Those reporters who responded to the invitation that they would attend included Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos from ABC, Mark Halperin and John Heillman from Bloomberg, Rachel Maddow from MSNBC, Savannah Guthrie from NBC, Maggie Haberman from the New York Times, and others whose names may not be as familiar to you from CBS, CNN, Daily Beast, Huffington Post, the New Yorker, PEOPLE magazine, Politico, VICE and VOX.
Food and drinks were provided by the campaign to the journalists covering this meeting on the condition that nothing said would be reported to the public.
The Clinton campaign has put a major emphasis on ensuring that journalists they believe are favorable to her are given information which will allow them to report the stories Clinton wants circulated in the press.
Sometimes the stories are actually drafted by the campaign. Such was the report this week by Wikileaks that in March of this year, Donna Brazile, who was Vice Chair for the Democratic National Committee at the time, as well as a contributor to ABC and CNN, had sent an email to the Clinton campaign, telling them that she “occasionally received questions in advance” and she passed on a question intended for use in a Town Hall meeting between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and which she said “worried’ her.
The identical question was then used in the Town Hall meeting, word for word as it had been allegedly sent out by Brazile.
It is, of course, unethical for material to be submitted to anyone in advance when preparing for an interview.
John Harwood, a CNBC correspondent and New York Times contributor, emailed the DNC numerous times, one time to request an interview and also to offer advice to the campaign. And yes, if you recognized his name, he served as a moderator in one of the Republican primary debates.
Harwood wrote in one email to John Podesta in May 2015, warning that “ Ben Carson would give you real trouble in a general election”, and then linked to a video clip that he had done with Dr. Carson.
New York Times Reporter Mark Leibovich emailed Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri portions of an interview he had done with Clinton and asked permission before using some of it. Palmieri gave him some editing suggestions which he followed.
Palmieri, whose name has been in the news this week with regard to the FBI investigation of Clinton emails, once asked State Department spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki to ensure that Secretary of State John Kerry wasn’t asked about Clinton’s private email server in an upcoming CBS interview.
As far back as January, Clinton was making plans to use what she called “friendly journalists” to plant stories in the press. She mentioned Maggie Haberman who is covering the election for the New York Times who had “teed up” stories for them in the past and had “never disappointed them.” She is mentioned as one of the attendees at the “intimate and off the record” gathering in April.
Michael Sainato, writing for The Observer in August, found in the July Wikileaks’ release of emails from the Democratic National Committee that both CNN and Politico had articles pre-approved by the DNC prior to publication.
Politico reporter Ken Vogel had DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda look over an article before he sent it to editors as part of an agreement.
In May 2016, Maria Cardona wrote an anti-Sanders opinion piece for CNN and admitted she had it pre-checked by the DNC first.
Other emails brought up the issue of the DNC offering CNN’s Jake Tapper questions to ask after Tapper’s producer wanted to know what the DNC Hispanic Media Director wanted to talk about on the show. To his credit, the Media Director, Pablo Manriquez, later resigned over the DNC staff pushing him to break impartiality.
The DNC emails make it apparent that it was standard procedure to write their own questions for CNN interviews.
According to more emails, The Washington Post hosted a joint fundraiser with the Clinton campaign, although the Post was unlisted at the fundraiser.
Even before Clinton announced her run for the presidency, she was making plans for manipulating the media. One of her managers, Robby Mook, sent out a memo in March of 2015 which provides insight into some of their tactics. Mook wrote that since journalists would be assigned to cover Clinton, they needed to be fed a “constant stream of stories” that the campaign liked. The memo went on to say that a key strategy would be to “give reporters something to cover other than the unhelpful stories about the foundation, emails, etc.”
As Sainato wrote in The Observer, “Rather than informing voters to enrich democracy, the mainstream media has developed a feedback loop between support for particular candidates and the political agenda they intend to support. The freedom of the press is necessary for a democracy to function. This freedom was subverted by the DNC at the consent of the mainstream media outlets. Instead of remaining autonomous, they allowed themselves to be manipulated by the DNC to back Clinton’s coronation as the Democratic presidential nominee.”
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